Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

(31) Ur Lament, l. 407
u 4.de 3 u 4 kalam.ma u 2.gu bi 2.ib.de 2.a.re
The storm that causes the light of the land to disappear,
The storm (u 4) can, therefore, be thought of as an utter darkness, whereas the light of the
land (as made clear by lines 409-410) is to be equated with Nanna, the moon-god. The
series of lines that end in *-re all seem to refer to the storm and the use of the
demonstrative *-re indicates the hope of those singing the lament that the storm will no
longer be visible in future. Clearly this use of *-re inverts the standard trope in which the
entities destroyed by the storm bear the *-re demonstrative. The inversion reaches its
culmination in line 410 and my reconstruction of the line without any possessive pronoun
on igi completes the contrast between the no longer visible storm and—as a direct
consequence of the disappearance of the storm—the visibility of Nanna, the moon-god, in
a clear, nighttime sky: uœ 3 saœ.gi 6.zu u 4…re igi nam bi 2.ib 2.du 8 “As for your black-
headed people, it is not THE STORM (u 4) that they will see, (but rather YOU, NANNA,
THE MOON-GOD, that they will see).” Hence the addition of the second person
possessive pronoun to igi to form igi.zu in some of the witnesses is apparently an attempt
to indicate the meaning of the passage in a more direct fashion than the use of the
contrast implicit in the negative contrastive focus construction.
Although this phenomenon can be thought of as a form of evidentiality (Chafe and
Nichols 1986), the contexts in which *-re occurs point to a more specific “problem,” if
you will, that the use of *-re solves: there is a fundamental difference between verbs such
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